Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software [Unknown Binding]

This book attempts to explain artificial intelligence in terms of how ant colonies, cities, and modern software operate. If it seems to have the feel of a magazine article, it's because it's not written by a professional in the field but by a professional writer who is a frequent contributor to trendy, popular publications such as Feed and Wired. Although it did not give me the understanding I was looking for about emergence theory, I would not dismiss it completely because it does have a lot of interesting information, as any good magazine article would. It has an overview of Jane Jacobs new urbanism that is both complete and illustrating, it explains how an intelligent kind of feedback makes some web sites successful as virtual communities, and what I found most interesting, how video games are evolving in ways that seem to give them a life of their own. If you are looking for an insightful, deep look at artificial intelligence for the layman, Douglas Hofstadter's "Godel Escher Bach" is still unchallenged. On the other hand if you are looking for a more relaxed, amusing and down to earth approach, filled with cool stuff you can impress your friends with, this book is for you.

Steven Johnson's "Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software" (Scribner, New York, 2001),is a very bad book, shallow, careless, and disappointing. I was lured by its nominal subject, which interests me greatly, and now I'm sorry I bought it. Mr. Johnson is a young- very young- video gamer who has managed to parlay a superficial aquaintance with the vocabulary of modern science into a series of trendy popular books, incomprehensibly praised by such authorities as Steven Pinker and Esther Dyson.
The book opens with a fraudulent pictorial simile, juxtaposing a side view of the human brain and a map of Hamburg ca. 1850. Indeed they do resemble each other, and the reader is supposed to infer (with no help from Johnson) that the resemblance arises from the operation of similar governing principles. Quite apart from the validity of this conclusion, it apparently does not trouble Johnson that the brain is three-dimensional and the city map is essentially two-dimensional, or that the comparison would fail if a frontal view of the brain had been chosen, or if Paris or El Paso or Denver had been chosen instead of Hamburg.
It gets worse. At the most fundamental level, after reading the book I find it impossible to say what the author means by "emergence", his nominal title. When he discusses ant colonies it appears to mean swarm intelligence; when he discusses video games it appears to mean interactive software; at still other places it appears to mean whatever recent developments in the realm of computers or biophysics or city planning that he approves of.
Moreover, he appears to be totally ignorant of all science and mathematics that preceded his own adolescence. Although he has a great deal to say about self-organizing systems, you will search the index in vain for the names of John Conway, Oskar Morgenstern, John von Neumann, Stanislaw Ulam, Stephen Wolfram, or most of the other pioneers of the field. When he does recognize a figure from antiquity (i.e., pre-1970), it is with worshipful adulation. He italicizes the name of Marvin Minsky as if he were a demigod, and finds a book by Norbert Wiener "curiously brilliant". What exactly is the curiosity?- that a brilliant mathematician should write a brilliant book? Likewise, you will find no entry in the index under "Boolean networks" or "cellular automata" or "crystallization" or "ferromagnetism." Under "entropy" you will find only the ludicrous assertion that in nonequilibrium thermodynamics "the laws of entropy are temporarily overcome." In short, Mr. Johnson gives new meaning to the phrase "born yesterday," a degree of ignorance and juvenile solipsism that borders on arrogance.
I note that other reader-reviewers assert that the book will provide lay persons with an introduction to a new science. No, it won't. The only thing it will provide is an introduction to bad science.

Johnson has a riveting introduction and opening but the rest of the book falls flat with a superficial treatment of emergence. The author would also have the reader think that he knows alot about cities and their development, but his actual understanding of the subject is very, very thin.

Try "Signs of Life" by Richard Sole and Brian Goodwin for a much better elucidation of complexity science and the role of emergence. Another book just out is "Self Organization in Biological Systems" published by Princten University Press as part of its series on complexity science.